Searching for the earliest record of life on Earth

摘要

Isua in West Greenland is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth. It is a barren, uninhabited, rocky mountain, sitting on the edge of the Greenland ice-sheet, about 150 km north-east of Greenland's tiny capital, the town of Nuuk (Fig. 1). There are no roads to Isua, for nobody lives there and access is by especially chartered helicopter. For most of the year, it is a dark, icy, wind-swept wasteland which comes to life only during the short summer months when the snow melts, the ice-covered lakes thaw and a small amount of vegetation turns the lower elevations into a blanket of green. It is during this short summer season that over the past five years an international team of scientists, led by Peter Appel of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and Stephen Moorbath of the University of Oxford, have been investigating one of the most fascinating scientific questions of all time - that of the origin of life on Earth.